| INDEX
Home
Weapons
Photo Galleries
News
Humor
Pages
New
Stuff
Recipes
Contact
Me
|
Owned
Owned is a slang word, predominantly used in North America, that originated among 1990s hackers, where it referred to "rooting" or gaining administrative control over someone else's computer.
The term's original usage was close to that of the traditional meaning of the word "own" - for instance, "I owned the network at MIT" indicated that the speaker had cracked the servers and had the same root-level privileges that the legitimate owner of the servers had. "Owned", a later variant, became more common in the late 1990s, as did the more abstract usage referring to any compromised security mechanism. By 1997, "owned" was regularly used in website defacements, and it subsequently spread to gaming circles, where it was used to refer to defeat in a game. For example, if someone makes a particularly good kill shot or wins a fight in a multiplayer video game, they might yell out "owned" to the loser(s), as a manifestation of victory, a taunt, or provocation.
Owned has now spread beyond computer and gaming contexts and become part of standard slang, where it typically entails severe defeat or humiliation, usually in an amusing way or through the dominance of an opposing party. Other variations of the word owned include own3d, 0wn3d and pooned, terms which incorporate elements of leetspeak.
August 15, 2009
|
